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Abstract - STQuant: Spatio-Temporal Adaptive Framework for Optimizer Quantization in Large Multimodal Model Training
Quantization is an effective way to reduce the memory cost of large-scale model training. However, most existing methods adopt fixed-precision policies, which ignore the fact that optimizer-state distributions vary significantly across layers and training steps. Such uniform designs often introduce noticeable accuracy degradation. To move beyond fixed quantization, we propose STQuant, a distributed training framework that reduces the memory footprint of optimizer states via dynamic precision allocation across layers, state variables, and training steps, while maintaining model quality. Naively applying dynamic quantization during training is challenging for two reasons. First, optimizer states are numerically sensitive, and quantization noise can destabilize quality. Second, jointly considering multiple states and layers induces a large combinatorial search space. STQuant addresses these challenges with two key techniques: 1) a provably near-optimal factor selection strategy that accurately identifies the most influential factors for precision adaptation. 2) a dynamic transition decision algorithm that reduces the search cost from exponential to linear complexity. Experiments on GPT-2 and ViT show that STQuant reduces optimizer-state memory by 84.4%, achieving an average bit-width of as low as 5.1 bits, compared with existing solutions. Moreover, STQuant incurs only O(N/K) computational overhead and requires O(1) extra space.
STQuant:面向大型多模态模型训练中优化器量化的时空自适应框架 /
STQuant: Spatio-Temporal Adaptive Framework for Optimizer Quantization in Large Multimodal Model Training
1️⃣ 一句话总结
这篇论文提出了一个名为STQuant的智能框架,它能在训练大型AI模型时,根据模型不同部分和不同训练阶段的需求,动态调整优化器数据的存储精度,从而在几乎不影响模型性能的前提下,将优化器占用的内存大幅减少超过84%。